9 Fascinating Things We Learned On The Set Of Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Captain America: The Winter Soldier Is Modeled To Be Like A ‘70s Conspiracy Thriller

Not only is Captain America: The Winter Soldier set a full 70 years after most of the events in Captain America: The First Avenger, but it’s also a completely different genre. While Joe Johnston’s film was largely inspired by Cap’s history as a propaganda-esque character and was a true-blue war film, the sequel will be changing things up quite a bit, and instead takes its inspiration more from 70s political/conspiracy thrillers.

In Captain America’s search to find his place in the modern world, one of the biggest conflicts that he keeps running up against is his affiliation with S.H.I.E.L.D., a clandestine organization that doesn’t always take out and neutralize threats in the most ethical fashion. The idea of making a movie about one man facing off against a powerful organization opened the door to the conspiracy thriller genre. Explained co-screenwriter Christopher McFeely, "The great thing about conspiracies is it’s usually not like 16 people versus a conspiracy - it’s one guy who becomes increasingly isolated. All of those movies do a great job of taking away the safety net until you’ve got one man who then has to decide whether he’s going to run in the opposite direction or will take them down."

So what movies were the directors, screenwriters and producers watching making the movie? John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man and Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View were both namedropped during the day on set, but the most often repeated title was Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor, partially because both it and Captain America: The Winter Soldier share a very special star…